Sermon – December 16, 2018 (Audio & Print)

Dear friends, grace to
you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

This year in the Illinois
State Capital building an atheist group was begrudgingly granted permission to
have a display alongside the other displays for the holiday season. And so,
right alongside the menorah on display for Hanukkah and the Nativity scene on
display for Christmas the Satanic Temple of Chicago placed a sculpture. The
sculpture depicts a snake coiled around a woman’s forearm, the hand of which is
holding an apple.

For people who reject the
claims of the scripture, they sure understand the symbolism of the Bible! There
sculpture is, of course, a reference to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve
disobeyed God’s command, choosing to eat of the forbidden fruit. The two were
tempted by the serpent who deceived them, who lured them into doubting God’s
word, saying to them: “Go on and eat it. You won’t die. God just said that to
keep you from being like him.” Ever since, serpents, snakes, and vipers have
been symbols of sin, symbols for the deceiver, symbols of deception and malice,
slithering sneakily in the grass, full of venom.

John the Baptist taps
into this symbolism in our gospel reading for today. He certainly isn’t
celebrating the serpent, as this atheist group is doing. Instead, he uses it to
describe the people coming out to hear him. “You brood of vipers!” he says.
“Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” John apparently missed the
memo on being seeker-sensitive and welcoming to newcomers. Instead, John does
the verbal equivalent of grabbing everyone by the throat: You brood of vipers!
You offspring of the serpent! You children of snakes! Who warned you to flee
from the wrath to come?

Without so much as a “Welcome,
glad you came,” John goes right to his diagnosis for these people. Those who were
coming out to him had been disobedient to God’s will. They doubted God’s word.
They wanted to be their own gods. They wanted to do what was right in their own
eyes. They were full of deception and malice and venom – and so they were like
the offspring of the serpent.

Note that John is
addressing everyone here. It is
different in Matthew’s gospel, where he is specifically referring to the
Pharisees and Sadducees. Luke seems to have heard the story from someone else
who remembered that John wasn’t just calling the religious authorities a brood
of vipers. He was talking to everyone, to the entire crowd of people from all
walks of life!

The diagnosis John so
bluntly gives is that they are a brood of vipers, that they have venom in their
veins, that they have slithered away from God. But John also gives them a
prescription. They are to repent. They are to change their minds and turn back.
They are to change their ways and return to God. This is not just a mental
exercise, but something that impacts their entire lives. They are to bear
fruits worthy of repentance. Instead of hoarding, they are to share. They are
to carry out their vocations with honesty and integrity. They are to be
honorable and kind and content. Even more, they are to look for the one who
will come after him, the one who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and
fire.

“And so,” Luke the
narrator writes, “with many other exhortations John the Baptist proclaimed the
good news to the people.” We don’t usually associate exhortations with good
news, but in this case it is indeed good news – because these exhortations are given
in anticipation of the one who will come after John, the one who will come to
save.

When someone is baptized
here at our church, we are reminded by our baptism liturgy that we are “born
children of a fallen humanity.” And so John’s words to the people apply to us
too. We too are children of the serpent. We have an inherited condition called
sin. You may not see the symptoms in the beautiful little babies we often
baptize, but they will show up soon enough. There’s a reason one of the first
words most kids learn is “mine!” The selfish unwillingness to share runs
through our veins from day one!

We disobey God. We doubt
his word. We want to be our own gods. We want to do what is right in our own
eyes. We have venom in our veins. And so we too need to repent. We never stop
needing to repent! Martin Luther once said that the entire life of the
Christian is one of repentance.

That is all true, and it
is why we begin each service with confession and forgiveness. But it is also
true that as we respond to the exhortations we hear in God’s Word and repent we
also hear good news. We have been given more than a prescription, we have been
given a savior! This savior has come to baptize us with the Holy Spirit – with
the very presence of God. This savior has come to baptize us with fire, burning
away all the chaff of our lives that separates us from God so that we might be
gathered in. This savior has come to adopt us, so that we wouldn’t be children
of the serpent, but children of God.

As some of you saw in my
Facebook post, this past week I had a kid in my office the other day sternly
reminding me that Jesus was NOT supposed to be in the manger of our creche here
in the sanctuary until Christmas Eve. I had accidently left him in there after
a preschool chapel service. “This happened last year too!” I was told. When I
posted it on Facebook I learned that other people noticed it too. One mom told
me her daughter saw it and was quite bugged by it! The Advent police are among
us, folks, and they aren’t afraid to come after the pastor!

While I am thrilled that
our young people understand Advent enough to know that Advent is a season of
waiting, we don’t need to pretend that Jesus hasn’t already come – especially
when we read a passage like our gospel reading for this morning. The one who
would come after John, the one who would be more powerful than him, has already
come. The one who saves us from the wrath to come has already come. The one who
would come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire has already come.

Jesus, the savior, has
already come, and you have been joined to him in your baptism. Jesus, the
savior, has already come, and he is at work in your life right now, bleeding
that venom out of you. Jesus, the savior, has already come, and he is calling
out of you the fruits of repentance.

While some venom remains
in all of us and we continue to see the effects of that in our lives and in our
congregation at times, it is also true that the fruits of repentance are
sprouting all over the place. I see them all the time!

Over the past couple of
weeks we’ve had tags on our Sharing Tree which have been joyfully picked up.
Those who have enough for themselves have shared with others from their
abundance so that poor immigrant kids in the Skagit Valley would have some new
clothes or warm coats or something fun to play with. You have shared from your
abundance so that the elderly at Josephine home, many of them lonely and
abandoned, would have something bright or soft to cheer them.

I’ve seen you use your
vocational gifts in such generous, selfless ways – whether its Jodi working on
our finances or Dave tending to our property or Anita facilitating our food and
fellowship, or any number of other volunteers we have here at Oak Harbor
Lutheran Church.

I’ve seen the way you’ve
been turned outside of yourselves to love and care for each other and for our
neighbors in need.

This isn’t the work of a
brood of vipers. This is the work of children of God! This is the work of the
Spirit given to you in your baptism!

As much as it pains me to
think of a satanic sculpture being placed in a state capital building in our
country, placed there by atheists to troll Christians and other religious
people, I have to say that I love the juxtaposition of their sculpture next to
a Nativity scene. Because you see, back in the Garden, after the serpent
deceived Adam and Eve and they ate the fruit, introducing sin and death into
the world, God spoke to the serpent. In Genesis 3:15, God tells the serpent
that one of Eve’s offspring would crush his head. Sin and death would be
conquered forever. His venom would have no power anymore. For centuries
Christians have seen this as a subtle, but powerful, reference to Christ.

The baby Jesus is in the
manger in the state capital building in Springfield, Illinois, lying there in
the hay just a few feet away from the sculpture. And so the savior is next to
the serpent. The antidote is next to the venom.

The baby Jesus isn’t in
our manger quite yet, but we rejoice today because our savior comes to us even
now through his word to crush the serpent in our hearts. Our savior comes to us
in his holy supper so that instead of venom, his blood would run through our
veins. Our savior comes to us with the Holy Spirit and fire to purify us
through his forgiveness, to reclaim us as his precious children, and to call
out of us the fruits of repentance, the fruits of faith.